Robert M. French
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Through Artificial intelligence, Turing test and Alan Turing
French is the inventor of Tabletop, a computer program that forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects placed on a table.
He has done extensive research in artificial intelligence and written several articles about the Turing test, which was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a means of determining whether an advanced computer can be said to be intelligent. French was for a long time an outspoken critic of the test, which, he suggested, no computer might ever be able to meet. French now believes that the way forward in AI does not lie in an attempt to flawlessly simulate human cognition (i.e., pass a Turing Test) but, rather, in trying to design computers capable of developing their own abilities to understand the world and in interacting with these machines in a meaningful manner.
He has published work on catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, the Turing test and foundations of cognitive science, the evolution of sex, and categorization and learning in infants, among other topics.
Early life and education
French attended Miami University from 1969 to 1972, earning a B.S. in mathematics after three years of study. From 1972 to 1974 he was at Indiana University, from which received an M.A. in mathematics.
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Career
Early career and doctoral studies
From 1972 to 1974, French worked as a teaching assistant in mathematics at Indiana University. For several months in 1975, he taught mathematics at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana.
He then moved to France, where from 1976 to 1985 he lived in Paris, working as a freelance translator and interpreter. During his years there, he collaborated with a colleague, Jacqueline Henry, on the French translation of Douglas Hofstadter's bestseller Gödel, Escher, Bach.
French returned to the U.S. in 1985 to become a graduate student in computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he pursued a Ph.D. under Hofstadter in artificial intelligence/cognitive science. He completed his doctoral work in 1992, receiving a degree in computer science.
His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Tabletop: An Emergent, Stochastic Computer Model of Analogy-Making. His thesis committee consisted of Hofstadter, John Holland, Daniel Dennett, Arthur Burks, John Laird, and Steve Lytinen.
“The key notion underlying the research presented in this dissertation,” wrote French in his summary of the dissertation, “is my conviction that the cognitive mechanisms giving rise to human analogy-making form the very basis of intelligence. Our ability to perceive and create analogies is made possible by the same mechanisms that drive our ability to categorize, to generalize, and to compare different situations.”
From 1985 to 1992 he was a research assistant in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During this period he was also a Visiting Researcher at CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1988), and a Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana (1991).
He spent several months in 1992 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. From 1992 to 1994, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. From 1994 to 1995, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Lecturer in Cognitive Science in the Department of Educational Psychology at the same institution.
Later career
From 1995 to 1998, French was a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Liège. From 1998 to 2000, he was an Associate Professor in Quantitative Psychology and Cognitive Science in the same department. From 2001 to 2004, he was a Professor of Quantitative Psychology and Cognitive Science in that department.
Since 2004, he has been the Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).